Oil be back!

It started with a glut of freelance work, followed by a bout of soul-searching about the blog that could have been confused with acute laziness. . . essentially I’ve taken a four-month vacation from writing here.

Yeah, paid work comes before Peak Generation every time. I owe that to my wife and children. (And right now I’m about to launch my own communications business, while working full-time and pulling in whatever freelance work I can get.) But I just can’t walk away from this blog, although I’ll freely admit that I did try, and that for a time I never wanted to see it ever again.

I questioned why I was blogging in the first place. To be honest, the only way I can really understand a given topic is to write about it. While it might be painful watching me struggle with basic concepts – writing garbage like demand exceeding supply – at least I don’t believe I can save the world or blog my way to riches, fame and drinking after hours.

But the more I come to understand, the more I believe that the availability of natural resources is going to be the key issue of this century. I can’t walk away from the concept of peak everything.

But there’s nothing in the media to suggest we face any resource issues. Stepping away from the blog brought this home to me. If you aren’t typing the term peak oil into Google news every day, then you would believe that nothing more than the occasional democratic change of government would solve everything.

I read through the whole Wikileaks thing: all those media commentators saying how irresponsible it all was, while repeating the juiciest allegations. But why was there nothing until recently of peak oil in all this? We got weeks of headlines about the foibles of foreign politicians.

More recently the media has been dithering about change sweeping through the Middle East. Right now Egypt is on the brink of regime change. Most likely it will be a military coup (or a leader otherwise appointed by the military) or else a handover to a Mubarak lackey, but the US media in particular is in terror of an outbreak of democracy or, worse still, a popular Muslim regime. Will Saudi Arabia be the next domino to topple? What would this mean to oil supplies? Would we face an energy shortage like that which followed the 1979 Iranian revolution, might it be more like the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, or could we see another frenzy of speculation driving up prices like in 2008? (The Canadian dollar is soaring on that speculation right now, with the overhyped oil sands becoming boosted as a strategic resource. But I don’t see much discussion of any of this.)

So, back to the blog. I can’t walk away from it. I tried, believe me, I tried.